The Idea That Won't Go Away
Theory #24 | In a battle of new and old ideas, which one wins?
A little while ago I was back in the idea maze. I’d learned something each time I’d been there before. So I came prepared with a short list of attributes of the kind of thing I wanted to create next.1
Of course the idea maze doesn’t just have one good idea. You usually discover many good ideas, so the real question becomes — how do you choose? It’s not having an idea that’s the bottleneck, it’s having enough conviction in one.
This time around the idea maze I learned something that I hadn’t accounted for in my list — that the best idea is rarely the new, shiny one. It’s actually the best idea that won’t go away.
Old ideas are better than new ideas
Ideas can be new or they can be old.2 (And by this I mean new to you, or old to you). Perhaps counterintuitively, I think old ideas are almost always better for you than new ideas. And the “idea that won’t go away” is by its very nature an old idea.
New ideas have that new idea energy.
They fill you with optimism. You feel the high of the “eureka…